Self-Hosting Movies with MoviX

The exploitation of Linux potentialities
on x86 platforms increased quite a lot in the last few years, but
an entire field of applications seems to me to be extremely
underdeveloped. I am referring to dedicated CD mini-distributions,
namely Linux distributions that live on a CD, contain exactly the
software needed to run some particular application and
automatically start that application at the boot. That is, they use
Linux only to provide us a background from which to run some
application directly from CD.

Let me provide a concrete example. Suppose you keep your
favorite audio/video files on CD in several formats, such as DivX,
XviD, MP3, OggVorbis and so on. Typically, when you try to play
your files on a PC different from your own, one of the following
happens: the machine has no HD; no player on that machine is able
to play your audio/video format; the codec you need is not
installed; or everything is there, but the playback quality is poor
even though you know with the hardware playback should be pretty
decent.

Now, suppose that together with your files you also burned on
the CD a minimal Linux system that is able to boot directly from
CD. It would start automatically and play all of the CD files. This
way the CD would be “self-sufficient”, you wouldn't have to worry
about any codec hassle, and you could be pretty sure that all PC
resources are devoted only to the playback. Actually, you even
would be able to play your files on a diskless PC. And, of course,
you could still play all CD files from your favorite OS when you
want to do so.

As you might imagine, such a philosophy is not limited to
audio/video playback. You can create dedicated Linux
mini-distributions for basically any application, including gaming,
text processing, multimedia editing, network broadcasting and so
on.

Let me point out the main advantages of such
mini-distributions:

No wasted HD space.

Ready to run every time you need it.

Runs even on a diskless PC.

Runs even where Linux is not present, helping Linux
diffusion.

This idea of “live” CD distributions is not new. Many good
examples of both big (DemoLinux, Knoppix) and small (LNX-BBC,
Devil-Linux) distributions are available, especially those that are
routering and firewalling oriented. But, I could find very few
examples of such dedicated ones (see Resources).

In particular, a few months ago I looked on the Net for a
Linux CD mini-distribution that is able to boot and play
automatically all audio/video files on the CD. I was very surprised
to find none. Therefore, my only chance to get one was to develop
it myself, and so I started working on MoviX. Now, I am not a Linux
guru and I know close to zero about multimedia playback, but the
beauty of open source is you can put together tools developed by
people who know much more than you and still create something new
and useful. I put together my knowledge of Slackware management
(I've been fond of Slackware since 1994) and the MPlayer (“the”
multimedia player) and IsoLinux (an easy-to-use Linux CD
bootloader) package I had recently found out on the Net and began
building my distribution.

Initially MoviX consisted in a single Linux CD
micro-distribution, but after a lot of feedback and requests from
MoviX users, the project split into three different packages, as
follows:

eMoviX: a CD Linux
micro-distribution (~7MB) meant to be embedded in a CD together
with audio/video files that is able to boot and play automatically
all CD files.

MoviX: a CD Linux
mini-distribution (~15MB) able to boot and launch a console
interface to MPlayer.

MoviX2: a Linux
mini-distribution (~30MB) containing a full installation of XFree86
4.2.0 and able to boot and launch gmplayer, the MPlayer GUI.

If you use MoviX or MoviX2, after the boot you can get rid of
the boot CD and use the interface to play most audio/video CD/DVDs.
In short, while eMoviX makes your CD self-sufficient, MoviX and
MoviX2 are some kind of “Swiss Army Knife of multimedia”, able to
make any PC a powerful multimedia station. And because MPlayer is
such a good piece of software, you can achieve good playback even
on a P200MMX.

The point I want to make in this article is that developing
this kind of dedicated mini-distributions is not hard once you have
a few guidelines. I hope to encourage the development of more such
distributions by describing below the main steps I followed to
build the MoviX packages. The only thing I assume is you are
accustomed to kernel/modules configuration and compilation.

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